For years, small and mid-sized law firms have been stuck choosing between two imperfect options: adopt enterprise platforms built for firms ten times their size or settle for lightweight tools that don’t quite deliver. One of our B:HIVE members is taking a different approach.
Jude is an AI-native legal workspace, designed specifically for how generalist firms actually work. And that “AI-native” label isn’t just marketing, it changes the experience entirely. Most legal tech today has AI layered on top. A chatbot here, a summariser there. Useful, but disconnected from the real work. You still need to stop, switch tabs, paste content in, and bring it back into your workflow. Jude flips that. The AI sits inside the work itself in the case, in the document, in the drafting. It’s not a feature sitting off to the side, it’s part of how the system is built. But the more interesting shift is what sits underneath that.
Every firm has its own way of doing things, how advice is structured, what questions get asked, what “good” looks like. That thinking is often the most valuable part of the business, but it typically lives in people, not systems. Jude is built to capture that as it happens. As lawyers work, the platform learns how the firm operates and turns that into structured intelligence that both the team and the AI can draw on. The goal isn’t to replace judgement, but to make sure a firm’s best thinking shows up consistently across every matter.
The idea came from spending time inside the industry. After visiting more than 150 firms, the pattern was clear most tools weren’t built for the people actually using them. They were built around legacy systems, not real workflows. Now, Jude is being used by firms across New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, the USA and the UK, part of a new wave of businesses rethinking how traditional industries operate with AI at the core.
It’s also a good reflection of what’s happening inside the B:HIVE.
We’re seeing more businesses that are AI-native from day one, sitting alongside established industries like legal, finance, and consulting. That mix matters. It’s where new ways of working get tested, challenged, and built in real time.